Video Game Reviews: Nintendo’s WiiFit
Wii Fit has been hyped beyond belief. Nintendo has been following the Apple methodology and is getting really good at the advertising, pr, word of mouth, blogo-hype machine system. When all of that is said and done, and you can’t buy one for less than $500 on the eBay, there is still one question - do I need to get this?
I should start by saying that I don’t like to exercise. Despite my love of basketball, skateboarding and badminton, I’m not what you would call ‘athletic.’ Once I was a young, skinny man, but that was before my time delivering pizza, eating cheesey breadsticks, and drinking soda for four to six hours a day. My time now revolves around my MacBook Pro, my Nintendo Wii, and the boob tube. I’ve gained a significant amount of weight over the last five years. I’ve tried gyms, running, treadmills, elliptical machines (the only one I could stand), yoga, and diets — I even worked in a gym for a short while. I was the nightshift guy at a 24-7 gym here in Philly. The people hated me! I would eat donuts and candy bars while sitting at the front desk. Wii Fit must be tested by me though, this is certain…
I reserved my Wii Fit months ago at the game store – de rigeur as my day job prevents me from waiting in line with my fellow game nerds. I picked up the hardware, paid my money and sped home. Unfortunately, due to circumstances out of my control, I had to wait two full days to begin the Wii Fit adventure. Finally, on Saturday morning, I fired it up.
Upon startup, the Wii forced a software update. Undeterred, I carried on. After the update, the real fun began. The Wii Fit balance board is animated and acts as your guide in the beginning sequence of the game (is this a game?) It tells you about fitness, balance, and some other good stuff — which I promptly clicked through as fast as possible. The most interesting part came next: the weigh in! Introductions finished, Wii Fit asked me to step on to the balance board to begin the “body test.” It does a really cute animation of my Mii character, in wireframe, spinning while Wii Fit tells you the status of the measuring process. Once the weigh-in is complete, the balance test starts and you are asked to shift your weight from one side to the other in a very controlled way. This isn’t completely instinctive, and it takes a few seconds for your mind and body to connect in this way. After you get the movement and concept down, then you have to get your body to stop over-adjusting. The balance board is very sensitive to motion and the slightest shift shows up on screen. When this is done, you enter your height and date of birth, right before the hard reality comes. This is probably the part you’ve heard about most - the Wii calling you fat, obese, or plump (okay, I made that one up.) Wii Fit did in fact call me overweight and I just barely escaped the obese rating, by mere pixels. If this wasn’t bad enough, then it tells you your Wii Fit age, which is something like how old my body is. I came up with a +13, which is not good. My wife watched all of these proceedings and needless to say, was less than happy about my condition. Hopefully this rude little machine can fix me…right?
Now that I know I’m overweight and an old fogey, Wii Fit wants me to do some exercises. That wasn’t gonna happen. I started out, like I’m sure most people did, with the balance games. When you start, only a few are available. As you put time in (the “Fit Bank” keeps track of this for you) new games, exercises, and yoga poses become available. The “Fit Bank” looks like a little piggy bank, and isn’t really very exciting.
I started with the Table Tilt game. It’s half Marble Madness, one third mini golf and 57% that old wooden game with the two twisty knobs: it’s really fun, kind of hard, and does a really good job of teaching you how to move on the balance board. On my third or fourth try I managed to complete table tilt on the easy mode. I then moved onto the slalom ski game. This one is excellent and quickly shows you that you have no skill on the balance board at all. I was all over the course, and struggled to hit any of the marked trail. After a few more failed attempts, I moved on to the very tempting ski jump game. This is by far my favorite and was totally addicting. You squat and gain speed down the ramp, and then at the last second you rise up, “DO NOT JUMP ON THE BALANCE BOARD”, and fly off the ramp into the air. During all of this you must keep your balance and aim for the longest jump. You get two tries, and initially I was awful at this as well. After the 20th try, it started to come together and I put some solid scores down.
At this point, I started to feel guilty because I was totally ignoring the fitness aspects of the game. I hopped over to the yoga training and selected the fit young lady, to my wife’s dismay, as my trainer. We did some deep breathing exercises — it was deep. Wii Fit tracks your balance, and after completing the move it shows you in dramatic fashion how your center of gravity is moving. Mine was moving all over the place. Sometimes you get nice words of motivation and other times, Wii Fit gives you subtle jabs like “maybe you aren’t ready for this yet, try…”
Onto something more fun, and kind of healthy: the aerobics section. This was surprisingly enjoyable. The first one is the hula hoop game, which makes you look like a total tool but is so much fun you just don’t care. You twirl your hips and then your Mii friends throw more hoops your way. I did pretty well, despite my wife laughing at me the entire time. Next up was the step aerobics, and once again this is pretty fun. It’s not quite Dance Dance Revolution, but it’s up beat and fun. Maybe it gets harder, but so far I’ve been able to keep up. The jogging game is interesting, but as I said before, I don’t like jogging. Virtual jogging isn’t much better. You don’t use the balance board at all — you just hold the Wiimote or put it in your pocket and run in place. I find that the holding it method works better for me, but nothing conclusive yet.
Enough with the fitness, back to the balance games. In the following two days I’ve done nothing but balance games and aerobics. I’ve lost a tiny amount of weight and all seems well. I can’t say that the Wii Fit is responsible for the loss - I’ve been carrying a lot of boxes, and moving stuff around, so let’s just say I could have lost the .237 of a pound that way.
Overall, the Wii Fit experience is a lot of fun. I will continue to play the balance games and I’ll give the yoga and strength training games another chance. I’ll post a more detailed story with my fitness progress in the coming weeks. I don’t think that Wii Fit is going to change the world, but I do think it’s a positive step in getting lazy people like myself to be aware of their weight and mass. It’d be hard to not be excited about future games that will take advantage of this device, such as EA’s Skate It. Punch Out, anyone? One thing’s for sure, this little hunk of plastic contains a hell of a lot of potential.
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[...] It’s been a while since I posted, and I’m feeling guilty about this post. I just wrote this review of the amazing Nintendo WiiFit for Geekadelphia.com. Yeah, no posts for a month, and I’m writing for other blogs. I know…I know –> View WiiFit review here. [...]